Pointing Domains and Search Engine Penalties

"If you have more than one domain name pointed to the same site, does this mean that search engines don't like you? That would seem like another case of search engines favoring big companies that can afford to have different websites for each domain name they own. Or do I misunderstand?" -- Brigitte Botnick, Fauna Art Studios

I posed Brigitte's question to Mike Grehan, author of the highly-respected Search Engine Marketing: The essential best practice guide. While I answer this briefly in the July 16, 2003 issue of Doctor Ebiz, his full answer is reproduced below:

I think I wish I had a penny for every time I was asked this one ;-)

The first thing to address here, is the fact that pointing a number of domain names at the same content is not the same issue as creating duplicate content on a number of servers.

Many people/companies "park-up" their other domain names and use methods such as frame-forwarding to redirect surfers to their main site with the actual content. Or, the domains may be on a permanent 301 redirect -- whichever.

Again, search engines are aware that people register many domains to protect trade names, brands, etc. They don't have a problem with this. What they do have a problem with is people or companies (and larger companies get no special preference over smaller companies at search engines) submitting many domains which all point to the same material to try and fool them.

Some people or companies think it's possible to increase ranking opportunities by doing this, but search engines can detect this and react to it. They only want pages from one clean domain with relevant material which is useful to their users.

Think about it this way (as search engines do): If you went to a shopping mall and used ten different entrances, all with different brand names - but kept ending up in the same store, you'd feel very frustrated.

Any attempt to manipulate the results at search engines is frowned upon and classed as spam. If all you are doing is, for instance, using a shorter and easier to remember domain name for your press advertising which users type into their browser and get redirected to your main site -- and only submitting your main site address to search engines -- then both search engines and surfers will like you ... for all the right reasons.

I hope that helps to clarify a bit more. As I said -- with search engines, it's a bit like dealing with politicians -- there's never really a clear answer!